Of all the controversies triggered by the Toleration Act, those relating to the use of chapels within parishes are some of the least well known. Though many Dissenters marked their new freedom by constructing meeting houses, some appropriated existing worship venues, particularly in the vast rural parishes of northern England. Dissenters attempted to employ one of the limitations of the Toleration Act, the requirement for the registration of meeting places, to legitimate their possession of such chapels. Contested chapels became physical manifestations of the controversies raised by the transition to limited legal religious plurality, as tolerated Protestant groups evolved into distinct denominations and asserted their place within English society. The strong attachment of many Presbyterians to chapels pointed to their tenacious commitment to the ideal of a suitably reformed Church and their self-conception as non-sectarian. Action by clergy and local lay elites to recover chapels for establishment use forced godly Protestants out of traditional worship spaces, signalling an end to the partial conformity that had characterised the mainstream of Restoration puritanism. The financial grants of Queen Anne's Bounty formed an element in the resolution of many disputes. Establishment successes in reclaiming ‘usurped’ chapels meant control of physical fabric, yet at the same time fostered the development of the multi-denominational society that so troubled many churchmen.

Chapels within parishes

The Restoration jurist Sir Simon Degge's much reprinted manual on ecclesiastical law, The Parson's Counsellor, defined a chapel as ‘a Church in a smaller caracter [sic] … differing nothing from a Church but in the dimension, or content, and that the Church is the Elder Sister’. This definition captures the usual connotations of both modest physical extent and inferior status, but the term was applied by contemporaries in a variety of ways. It was used, for example, for distinct spaces within churches, formerly employed for the celebration of private masses and perhaps still used for the interment of specific families. However, in a general sense a ‘chapel’ was a dedicated worship venue other than the church of a parish or cathedral of a diocese. A single parish might therefore contain within its bounds multiple chapels. Such chapels within parishes can be divided broadly into two categories: those which were domestic and those of a more public character.